Deeplinks Blog posts about Innovation

New Yorkers: Worried about whether you will have a right to watch local TV broadcasts on your Internet devices? Aereo is a company that lets users watch their local channels by renting a dime-sized antenna at Aereo's facility - one per customer. The signal from that antenna gets sent over the Internet to a single user. In effect, the company moves the "rabbit ears" antenna from the top of your TV set to a central facility. Aereo, like the VCR, the DVR, and many other video technologies, simply lets people watch the TV shows they already have a legal right to watch at different places and times, and on different devices. And just like they did with many of those technologies, copyright owners are suing to shut it down.

In Colombia, executive lawmakers are hastily pushing through a new copyright reform law for Congressional approval ahead of President Barack Obama’s visit to Colombia in mid-April for the Summit of the Americas. In doing so, they are skirting existing legislative processes and forcing through a bill that exceeds international and US norms at the cost of Colombian citizens’ rights.

The Internet can breathe a sigh of relief today. In the latest twist in the long-running Viacom v. YouTubelitigation, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals revived the entertainment giant’s suit against Google – but simultaneously eviscerated most of the legal theories on which the lawsuit was based.

Here’s the quick and dirty: Back in 2010, a district court threw out Viacom’s suit against YouTube, finding that the safe harbors outlined in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act protected YouTube from all copyright liability. Viacom appealed, based on unprecedented legal theories that, if adopted, would have rendered the DMCA safe harbors a dead letter.

Reps. Joe Baca and Frank Wolf have introduced a bill this week that would require game publishers to add a "clear and conspicuous" warning label to most new video games. HR 4204, the Violence in Video Games Labeling Act, is only the most recent in a series of legislative attempts to restrict or otherwise hinder speech in the form of interactive media.

UPDATE: As expected, the Supreme Court send Myriad, the breast cancer gene case, back to the Federal Circuit for rehearing in light of its ruling in Mayo. Hopefully the Federal Circuit will accept the high court's invitation to hold that DNA is not patentable.

We're happy to report that the patent system is getting a much need jolt of sanity, in the form of a clear Supreme Court ruling affirming a basic, but sometimes forgotten, principle: laws of nature, and obvious methods of working with them, are not patentable.